I don't really know how not to include it in the calculation, or if someone could give me a hint as to how to drop a test score without including it in calculation. there is nothing in this chapter or past ones that talks about doing something like this .but the way i did it it should work, execpt it tells me that lowest is an undiclared indentifier in the void showAverage part. Also when i remove this part my input validation wont work properly, actually it doesn't work at all. Why is that is no different from how i had written it before.

It helped in getting the validation loop to work, But Getting it to display the average without the lowest score that is still not working, its giving me a reallly long number that is not even close. to the answer. I still think the last part for show average is wrong, but i can't figure out how to get the lowest grade out before calculating the average of the remaing grades.

Since im not supposed to take the grade out directly in the calculation i added lstotal and number to go with the calculation and in main i defined what they are. The end result is not the answer but a really long number. I don't know if i linked them to a random/generated number or if i did it correctly and linked them to the original values input by user. Please assist in correcting my new mistake.

Edited
5 Years Ago
by mike_2000_17: Fixed formatting

Salem
commented:
Getting fed up with seeing unformatted code, and people keeping asking you to use them-7

the easy way for you to not use the lowest score when you calculate the average is to sort your array to have the lowest score in the first element then use a for loop and start at the element after that. example

int numberOfScores;
float average;
cout << "please enter the number of test scores to enter: ":
cin >> numberOfScores
float * scores = new float[numberOfScorse];
// ask the user for each score
// run the sort and have the lowest score in scores[0]
// then to get the average
for (int i = 1 /*start at 1 because 0 is the lowest*/; 1 < numberOfScores; i++)
{
average += scores[i]; // this will sum up all the elements except the lowest
}
average /= (numberOfScores - 1); // divide buy the number of scores minus 1 because you dropped the lowest
cout << "The average score is " << average << ".\n";

Thank you NathanOliver, your example really helped out in trying to figure out the proper way of solving my problem. And you are right it does make everything so much more easier. I think others tried to tell me that before, but you explained it better. Also thanks to everyone for your tips along the way. It is much appreciated.